


Anna

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [18]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:36:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Full name: Anna Jülich-Cleve-Berg.  Fourth wife of Henry VIII. The last of his six wives to die (outliving Catherine Parr by nine years). She died at Hever Castle, birthplace of Anne Boleyn.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Anna

**Author's Note:**

> Full name: Anna Jülich-Cleve-Berg. Fourth wife of Henry VIII. The last of his six wives to die (outliving Catherine Parr by nine years). She died at Hever Castle, birthplace of Anne Boleyn.

In the house of a dying woman, men in dark clothes talk quietly in dim hallways. She lies listening, plucking at the edges of the bed-clothes with her fingers. They do not sound sad, but during the old King’s reign they got used to, if not rejoicing at the death of a Queen, then showing no pain. Now she lies dying in this place that she has always loved, this Hever castle among the green gardens of England. And maybe Cleves had been so green once, spread out on either side of the Rhine, but it is many years since she returned home, so who could say truly now? 

The truth is this: the old King is dead and there is no-one left to love her as she should be loved. Henry has been dead these long ten years but he loved her, once, though he would not be married to her. What had he called her? What had he called her when he divorced her and gave her many palaces but never had her crowned? 

“Beloved sister.”  
“Hello, Henry.”

Even now, she finds a smile for him. Even now, she sees him at his brightest. He comes to her in cloth of gold, with the light of some hitherto unseen sun caught in beard and hair. He refracts the light. The smell does not follow him here. 

Propped up against her pillows, Anna smiles at him and holds out her hands. So close to death, her dreams are strange and powerful. The English like their bed-curtains drawn tight to protect from pestilence and prying eyes. Other people’s business may well be a national pastime, but Anna has always preferred her curtains open to let in a breath of fresh air and so that she can see the window until last light. 

“I love this place best,” she says, as he takes her hand.  
“When I would be married to you no more,” he says.  
“Ja, doch.”

The day that he decided that was the happiest day of her life. People lie and say that he called her ugly, but he never did…or at least, if he did then she never heard it from him, only the gossips. She’s asked him about it before, but he always shakes his head and smiles and they were married so briefly once, so what right does she have to his secrets now?

Anna squeezes his hands gently. Her women are too afraid of death to sit with her for long. She’s grateful to him for coming. She’s pleased that there is someone with the strength to sit beside a woman who knows that she is dying. She’s pleased that he loved her enough, in his way, to keep coming back.

Henry’s thumb strokes soothingly against the dry skin of the back of Anna’s hand. In the last few weeks, Anna’s hands have grown old. At Chelsea Manor she noticed it and knew that it was time to come back to Hever, all the while thanking God for giving her that moment of grace in which she could decide where exactly it was that she wanted to die. 

“Shall we play then?” he asks her. In his lifetime, he might have ordered her, or dealt the cards without a word, but, now, oddly, he’s learned softness. Perhaps it has something to do with the two daughters, or the one wife who outlived them all, or the son who barely lived at all. Perhaps it is an accumulated sadness that makes him quieter now. Perhaps the dead know more than they are given credit for.

Anna nods and struggles to sit up higher in her bed. Her thighs make a flat enough surface to play on. On her wedding night, she screamed until Henry stopped trying to touch her. She never had another; no husbands and no wedding nights either, but now she’ll let him touch her, enough to play cards, at least.

Good enough.

They play with a deck of cards in gold. The faces of the Queens seem familiar. The Annas and the Catherines. It was always Annas or Catherines with Henry; like ships on his tide, all of the poor Annas and Catherines of the world.

It isn’t a good hand. Anna fingers the edge of one Queen’s card; the Boleyn woman, with her cruel pout, her piss and her vinegar. The flash of red petticoat against grey damask is lurid, too fancy for Anna’s tastes. In Cleves, she had been a sombre child, and she never really grew out of it, became a sombre woman by the time Holbein came to paint her. Instinctively, she dislikes theatrics. They say that the Boleyn woman was a witch. Anna heard that, even at the distance that they kept, but Anna knows all about the things that people will say to make a story more interesting when the story should read more simply. 

The simplest story in the world is this one: that once, there was a Queen of England, and she bore no sons. 

Mostly, they’re silent. They never felt the need to talk while they played. Anna did many of the things which she did in silence. Sometimes, Henry wants to talk; about his girls, but never his wives. In far off lands, she has heard that there are Caliphs and Potentates who take many wives at a time. Anna always thinks that maybe the most sensible thing that Henry ever did was to only have one wife at a time, each best forgotten in a seemly time, but the daughters, he always remembered. He likes to talk about the daughters, one of them queenly, the other proud, both very like their father and neither of them quite beautiful, in the end. 

And both of them Queen of England, which is more than Anna ever was.  
Distracted by her bad luck, Anna reaches out one hand and she is surprised when Henry takes it.

“Did it hurt you?” he asks, sounding his age for once, with all of the brash confidence gone. Sounding young. He must have seemed very young when the first Katharina came to caught, before Arthur Tudor died. “When I didn’t want you, I mean. Did it hurt?”

How unsurprising; a man who cannot conceive of a woman in the world without him.  
Anna considers it for a moment, and then she shakes her head.

“I didn’t want you to want me. You were revolting by the time I came to England. Fett. And you smelt terrible. All of the gold in Christendom couldn’t have made me want you to want me.”

Once upon a time, such frankness might have ended her life with the edge of a sword, but the King is dead now and Anna is old, and God grants license to old women. And Henry had always thought himself very close to God.

Once, he might have killed her but, now, Henry Tudor laughs.

“I remember the wedding night. You screamed like you were being murdered.”

Now she is laughing too.

“I didn’t need the power. I didn’t want the influence. I wanted a little peace, maybe, and England is a beautiful country.”

She wasn’t the only one who survived him. One Anna and one Catherine, in the end. Married twice before Henry, and once after him, so, perhaps, Anna always thought that Catherine Parr might understand what a woman might live through and go on living, afterwards. Four husbands couldn’t be the end of Catherine the Last, but a babe could. A love that passeth all understanding, but what does she know, Anne of Cleves who never married again after Henry, who bore no children and enjoyed her little life very much indeed?

She is just playing cards with her King.

“I liked your Katharina’s house, but I like this one better.”

Henry looks very much like his daughter, like Elizabeth, when he smiles.

Her head is nodding again and she drops her cards, feels them fall and separate and flutter to the bed, one two three four five, like something out of history, like a record or a promise. Four Queens to a deck plus one besides and still clinging on, but not long now. Not long left. 

She feels a kiss against her forehead. When she wakes up in the morning the cards will be gone, taken by Henry for safe-keeping, for the next time.

“I loved you very well for many years,” says Anna von Jülich-Cleve-Berg, Anne of Cleves to Henry Tudor, a beloved sister to a King. “I just never needed you to love me, Henry. I never needed anybody to love me.”

How funny, Anna thinks as she falls asleep, how many women need to be loved by a man to survive. 

She sleeps and, in the night, somebody comes into the room and draws the bed-curtains in close around the dying woman who had been queen once, for three weeks, fourth and last, divorced but always loved. Under her pillow, a gold wedding ring wrapped in a scrap of velvet engraved with six words in English. She was long divorced by the time she learned to read them on her own.

_God send me well to keep._

Anna falls asleep, perhaps for the last time, perhaps not, and dreams about how very surely many women come to be killed by love. 

For a little while, until she’s sleeping, the King stays, shuffling the cards between fingers which, in death, are not too fat.  
Keeping watch.


End file.
